Gertrude Shaw Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main Page
From Labor Action, Vol. 7 No. 32, 9 August 1943, pp. 1 & 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The vast majority of railroad workers have not received a wage increase since 1941.
Brushing aside this most pertinent fact, crafty spokesmen for the railroad monopoly are talking hard and fast to convince the special board holding hearings on the railroad unions’ demands for wage increases, that such increases should not be granted.
For instance, the vice-president of the New York Central beats his chest and assures the workers that he is looking out for their interests in refusing the wage increase. For, don’t you see, “any further wage increase for railroad employees will invite the disaster of inflation, with consequent injury to wage earners themselves.”
However, the ghost of inflation no longer scares the workers – for two very good and sufficient reasons.
One is that the purchasing power of the dollar has decreased and prices have become inflationary WITHOUT WAGES GOING UP!
The other reason why workers don’t scare, when the bosses pull their inflation puppet-ghost out of the closet, is that the workers see that inflationary prices and big war profits go together – so that when bosses cry “cheese it – inflation,” they only voice their objection to parting with even an inchy-binchy bit of those profits by increasing workers’ wages.
So the railroads – like all the bosses – have tightened their purse strings against wage increases – even though railroad workers are now comparatively worse off than other groups of workers. IT IS A WAR-FATTENED PURSE THAT THE TRANSPORTATION MONOPOLISTS ARE GUARDING.
A.F. Whitney, president of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, testifying before the aforesaid special wage board, said that last year the Class I roads of the country had an all-time stupendous net operating income of $1,480,940,760 – after deducting taxes and all the other deductibles. This year, Mr. Whitney said, railroad dividends are being boosted by FORTY-FIVE PER CENT.
The financial pages of the papers bear out Mr. Whitney. For instance, the take of the Pennsylvania Railroad for the five months ending May 31 was $1.82 net per share – as against only $1.21 a year ago, OR AN INCREASE OF FIFTY PER CENT. Wall Street has confidence in the railroads coming in with a pirate’s loot this year – for, since the beginning of the year the market prices of railroad stocks have risen by from one-third or one-half.
As to some of the methods used by the railroads in getting their “just rewards,” there is a report, dated September 8, 1942, by Thurman Arnold, former assistant United States
Attorney General. This eye-opening report would have been completely suppressed by the boss press – presumably as unfit to print, or as giving information to the enemy. But the Railroad Brotherhoods pushed the report but into the light of day.
Mr. Arnold found that the financial giants behind the railroads made a little deal with twenty-three domestic air lines to stop the free development of air freight transportation – so as not to take away from the railroads any business they don’t want to give up. The effect of this “progressive” agreement – whereby the air lines pledged to charge at least twice as much as the railroads, and actually charge seven times as much – is that “all cargo on the domestic air lines of the United States is the exclusive monopoly of the railroads.”
Grover Loening, technical consultant for a government department, is quoted by Mr. Arnold as follows:
“This monopolistic contract exerted a very great influence in retarding the development of air cargo carrying in the United States, 90 that we find ourselves today in this war emergency having to make literally frantic efforts to catch up to a position that we could have well had many years ago ...”
The full-page ads of big business – which are charged to the government on cost-plus contracts – would have the innocent reader believe that the bosses are making all kinds of “sacrifices” for the war – and that without them there would be no economic development, no industrial progress. The Arnold report clearly shows how the railroads have “sacrificed” for the war and how they have “furthered” the improvement of transportation.
The railroads have forced artificially high rates not only in air transort but in all transport “without regard to carrier costs or the value of the services rendered.” This is accomplished by deals and combinations, in the art of which capitalist “enterprise” is very efficient.
The tremendous increase in the volume of rail traffic due to government war orders has, of course, actually reduced the ton-mile costs of transportation because of the heavy car-loadings per haul. But the railroad magnates, being all-out for war profits, this does not constitute a reason either for reducing rail rates or for paying higher wages to railroad workers.
Mr. Arnold cites a most interesting instance where the railroads did reduce their rates. Before Pearl Harbor – to enable the steel interests, closely connected with the railroad monopolists, to sell to the Japanese at an attractive price, steel now used against American boys – the railroads charged only seventy-four cents per hundred pounds for transportation
from Bethlehem, Pa., to Portland, Ore. THE MOST OBLIGING UNCLE SAM WAS THEN PAYING ALMOST TWICE AS MUCH, OR. $1.43 PER HUNDRED POUNDS, FOR TRANSPORTING THE SAME STEEL PRODUCTS THE SAME DISTANCE.
So here we have another species of MERCHANTS of DEATH, the railroad monopolists. However, it is not exactly right to say “another species.” The big bosses are all one – one for profits – one against labor. Whether in steel, in copper, in oil, in transportation – they are knit together by interlocking ownership and by the tentacles of high finance. All benefit from the machinations of each.
THE CRISIS THE WORKERS TODAY FIND THEMSELVES IN CALLS FOR UNION MILITANCY AND FOR A PROGRESSIVE PROGRAM LEADING TO WORKERS’ CONTROL OF ALL INDUSTRY AND TRANSPORTATION.
Gertrude Shaw Archive | Trotskyist Writers’ Index | ETOL Main Page
Last updated: 15 June 2015